Trump is Reforming the Intelligence Community Already
Times are changing for America’s spies as major reform looms with the return of Donald Trump to the White House next week
Last week, this newsletter delivered a detailed exclusive assessment of the grave counterintelligence crisis that’s confronting Team Trump as it prepares to commence its second term in the White House. It would be difficult to overstate the size of the unprecedented counterspy trouble we’re facing today, which dwarfs the counterintelligence problems that America contended with during the Cold War. Here China looms not just large, but enormously so.
Top Secret Umbra also reported that some of the personnel choices being floated by the incoming Trump administration regarding top intelligence jobs were far from ideal. This focused on the National Security Council, where the incoming senior intelligence director was said to be Adam Howard, a career Capitol Hill staffer with zero experience in the operational intelligence world. Howard has served as the GOP staff director on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as a protégé of its powerful chair, Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH).
Informed people on Planet MAGA were perturbed by Howard’s appointment, given his lack of real-world intelligence skills, plus his paucity of apparent devotion to Trump and his agenda vis-à-vis the Intelligence Community. For anybody hopeful for serious IC reform over the next four years, which is sorely needed and overdue, Howard represented a status quo choice that, per his mentor Turner, was more likely to defend the IC than demand its root-and-branch reform. It was not much of a secret in our nation’s capital that the HPSCI chair viewed the installation of his guy Howard as the NSC’s top intelligence official, the critical interface between the White House and America’s spy services, as his effort to run the IC his way, not Trump’s.
Moreover, Howard was known to possess counterintelligence liabilities, as Top Secret Umbra exclusively reported. Someone who brags about leaking classified information to journalists, as IC sources told me Howard was known to do, is not a good fit for the enormously sensitive job of top intel official inside the White House. This newsletter suggested that polygraphs were in order for senior NSC staffers, in the event that the incoming Trump administration develops a serious leak problem like the last time they occupied the West Wing.
Clearly someone was reading, since the HPSCI chair was just fired unceremoniously. Yesterday brought the surprise news that House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced the dumping of Rep. Turner from his HPSCI perch. This significant development was met with disapproval from Democrats, who viewed this as Speaker Johnson doing the president-elect’s bidding. However, cashiering Turner from his powerful leadership of the HPSCI was overdue. As Tom Rogan has reported, Turner earned the ire of many across the IC last year when he revealed the existence of an advanced Russian anti-satellite weapon, a fact which was considered Top Secret by our spy agencies. That Turner seemingly revealed this classified information for his own benefit made the scandal worse.
Turner should have been fired from his committee chair for that, and there should be no tears for him now that’s it’s happened. The spook rumor mill has it that Adam Howard will not be moving to the NSC now that his mentor has been fired, which would make sense. Just as significant, Turner’s replacement as HPSCI chair will be Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR), which is a harbinger of serious IC reform. On the HPSCI, Crawford has handled the CIA account, and he’s an advocate for major changes to that agency.
In particular, Crawford has been a sharp critic of CIA for its shameful handling of the Anomalous Health Incidents issue, what’s popularly misnamed the Havana Syndrome. As this newsletter has explained in exclusive detail in recent years, the AHI debacle represents the biggest scandal in the history of American intelligence. Hundreds of Americans, many of them IC personnel, have been harmed and even crippled by mysterious attacks across the world, including at home in the United States. Some victims have died, while others have seen their family members harmed. Throughout its four years in office, the Biden administration has covered up the painful truth that’s known to the IC – namely that the mystery weapon is Russian in origin while Russian and Cuban spies have employed it against Americans in numerous countries all over the globe, as well as in Washington, DC, itself.
Worse, Biden’s IC leadership, including Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and CIA Deputy Director Dave Cohen, have orchestrated a conspiracy that’s designed to silence AHI victims while preventing them from telling the truth, even to Congress, about what’s happened to them and their families. This is a sordid story, filled with cynicism and illegalities, that demands a full telling after thorough bipartisan investigation by Congress.
Nevertheless, cracks are appearing in the AHI cover-up as the Biden administration comes to an end. Last week, the Office of the DNI released an Unclassified assessment on AHI, updating its thoroughly mendacious March 2023 assessment. This version offers some hedging, including the admission that while most of the IC still assesses that it’s “very unlikely” that a foreign actor is behind AHI, there are two IC agencies which dissent in some fashion. One IC entity has concluded that there’s “roughly even chance” that a foreign entity is behind some of the attacks, while a second IC entity assesses something analytically similar.
One of those semi-dissenting IC entities is the National Security Agency, which has raised the issue of foreign involvement in AHI because it possesses highly classified signals intelligence revealing that Russian spies, especially its Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, known as GRU, stand behind the mysterious attacks on Americans. NSA insiders tell me that the agency has collected SIGINT intercepts of top Kremlin personnel joking about the GRU attacks on Americans, which is something of a tell.
This amplifies the detailed press reporting by The Insider a few months ago, which marshals impressive open source information that makes a compelling case that GRU’s sinister Unit 29155, which does dirty work for the Kremlin worldwide, stands behind many of the AHI attacks. The Biden administration has pretended that such publicly available reporting, including what Top Secret Umbra exclusively has brought to light about these attacks, simply doesn’t exist.
That cover-up is coming to an end next week when Joe Biden relinquishes the Resolute Desk to Donald Trump. However, let it be noted that Team Biden and its IC minions have tried their best to hide the truth about AHI with ample assistance from their media allies. As with so many issues over the last four years, Democrat-aligned journalists have proved remarkably incurious about Biden scandals, and AHI ranks among the worst of these. Here the standard playbook has been employed. IC insiders tell me that CIA senior official Dan Miller, who “made his bones” by executing the AHI cover-up at Langley, briefed friendly journalists, giving them the revised talking points about the Havana Syndrome.
See the recent reporting of Michael Isikoff, which perfectly follows the revised DNI party line that, while there are some dissenting IC agencies regarding AHI, it’s really no big deal. This reads like a massaged White House press release, because functionally, it is. Why Isikoff and others have chosen to simply issue Biden’s DNI and CIA talking points, which are designed to discredit AHI victims and their advocates, instead of properly investigating this issue themselves, is an important question demanding an answer.
Perhaps an answer is coming. With Rep. Crawford as the new HPSCI chair, we can be assured that Congress will investigate AHI in 2025 with never before seen vigor and inquisitiveness. The same may be coming to Langley. Yesterday, John Ratcliffe, the former DNI who is Trump’s second term pick to head CIA, told Senators that he wants to change how that agency does business in many areas, promising a return to rigorous spying without politics or partisanship. AHI came up several times during his Senate questioning for confirmation, including his statement:
I will review all existing information and analysis and pursue all leads that provide insight into the cause and origin of AHIs and all medical incidents with a CI nexus. I will ensure that, under my leadership, CIA will pursue this issue aggressively, objectively, and with total analytic integrity. I will also ensure that all Agency personnel are provided the care necessary to address health issues which result from any condition while in the performance of their duties.
Ratcliffe added that he will keep Congressional oversight committees informed about any AHI developments which emerge. There’s no going back now. While it would be naïve to expect Trump’s IC, including CIA, to come clean with the full, awful truth about AHI, Ratcliffe has publicly committed to getting closer, at least. This means the end of the Biden coverup and, just possibly, the beginning of honest inquiry and intelligence analysis of our terrible AHI problem, which stretches back almost three decades. Together, Crawford and Ratcliffe can force the truth to come out.
For the IC, there are a couple new sheriffs in town, or at least headed there imminently. It’s safe to say that the Biden administration’s shameful coverup of AHI has come to a deservedly sordid end. What comes next in this story, no matter what it is, has to be more honest than the lies proffered by Team Biden about AHI since 2021. Watch this space.
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